Direct Linking Or Landing Pages To CPA Offers?

Today, let’s tackle a question that has existed since the dawn of internet marketing.

“What should you use? Direct linking or landing pages?”

This question is one that all marketers wonder about. You can probably see why a lot of marketers love direct linking, because it is hassle free (for the most part anyway) and just plain simple to do.

However, other marketers believe that direct linking is ‘old school’ if you like. Instead, they opt to send traffic to their landing or squeeze pages, which helps them ‘warm up’ their leads to the juicy offer or captures their email.

Either way, it may be no surprise to you that there is no definite answer to this issue.

If you are promoting offers, where you only have to get your prospects to submit 1 or 2 details like a name & email, zip code or even just a username & password, you could probably do with direct linking in a lot of cases.

This is because you may be losing conversions if you have an extra step (i.e a landing page), because some people will just close it and will never see the offer page.

If you are promoting a membership site with monthly recurring charges or a trial offer that requires a valid credit card submit, for example, sending your traffic to a landing page to pre-sell and ‘push them over the fence’ so to speak, is probably a good idea.

As you can see, it is difficult to draw the line for when you should use direct link as oppose to building a landing page.

My only advice for you is to test everything.

That being said, you can also do some manual research on your competition.

For example, if you are promoting a Clickbank offer on Bing.com, simply type the product’s name into the search bar and see what ads come up.

Click on them and find out for yourself if your competitor is direct linking or sending you to a landing page. You can literally do the same for anything else you promote.

You can also just type in your niche into the search engine and see what products are being promoted. Again, just click on them and see what works for your niche.

I don’t think you need fancy tools to make this decision.

A simple search will do!

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(Obviously you don’t want to be typing in those questions like I did above. Type in the product name or niche that you want to promote. Just putting it out there in case)

Whether you choose to go with direct linking or opt to set up landing pages, also depends on your market.

Well, obviously the notorious squeeze page that we see so often in the internet marketing niche, may not work so well with the puppy training niche.

In case there’s anyone reading this post that doesn’t know what a landing page is, give me just 2 seconds to explain.

Click through landing pages – This type tells your prospect the bare essentials of your offer (benefits) and hopefully convinces them to ‘click through’ to the sales page or the company’s website to complete the action.

Lead capture landing pages – This one is self-explanatory really. These pages are very simple and often include very little text designed to capture your prospect’s email.

Fake Articles/Blogs (Advertorials) – You’ve probably come across these pages before. They look like a blog from a magazine or news site. However, they are literally just a fake landing page designed to pre-sell the offer with fake stories, fake testimonials and fake navigation tabs.

Product detail landing pages – This is basically an informative page about a specific product and their use is common in the commercial industry.

Homepages – Yes, you read right. Some marketers use the homepage of their website as a landing page. While this may be good for branding purposes, the homepage has too many distractions and links on it that it may defeat the purpose.

[su_heading size=”24″ margin=”40″]Pros and Cons[/su_heading]

Let’s talk about some pros and cons.

Direct Linking

Landing Pages

PROS:

Fast, easy, newbie-friendly

Ability to test the conversion of your offer

No need for your own website/domain

PROS:

Ability to capture leads (if you use it as a squeeze page) and market to a list of relevant potential customers later on

Thanks For Sharing

To be honest, I quite like the idea of using direct linking to test out your market first. Then, once you have collected enough data and want to optimize for conversion, go ahead and send your traffic to a landing or squeeze page.

That’s all I have to say about this topic.

Kindly comment below and let me know what has worked for you in the past.